sexta-feira, dezembro 22, 2017

The Smallnesses of War: "The Two of Swords, 3 volumes" by K.J. Parker

“I always say that music can’t be about anything, it ought to be as close to abstract as it’s possible to get in an imperfect world. Otherwise you get stuff like violins trying to sound like rainwater, which is very well, but rain does it so much better. What’s for dinner?”

In “The Two of Swords, Volume 3” by K. J. Parker

This book in particular, and K. J. Parker’s SF in general, reminds
me of a quote by Yevgeny Zamyatin:

“It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there
are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive
also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no
mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in
error, in search, in questions, in torment.”

Zamyatin was referring to the deadening effects of Stalinist
oppression on the arts but I think his quote can apply to bureaucratic and
warring societies like ours as well. Go and apply for a bank loan or talk to a
lawyer about an insurance claim and experience some treasured moments with the
dead-alive.

Despite being fortunate enough to be married with kids and
have enough close friends in my life, I like solitude. I've always identified
with Graham Greene's protagonists, as well as those appearing in many of Haruki
Murakami's stories. Maybe that’s why I'll probably never outgrow the teenage
thing (SF, AOR music, dabbling in programming, rugby, etc.).

Anyway, veering slightly off topic, I realised recently that there
isn't enough time left to probably read all the books I've ever wanted to read,
which struck me as a bit sad. Imagine how you would feel when you got to the
last page of the last remaining book which you wanted to read. It is a bit like
money. It might seem to be a good idea to run out of it just as you get to the
point of dying but it is probably more sensible to still have some left when
arriving at that destination.

That is why love both Montaigne and now K. J. Parker: Montaigne in
his essays (a genre he is credited with having invented), he seems to have
covered the whole of human subjective experience and emotion, questioning and
reflecting on everything from various perspectives; K.J. Parker is able to
that with SF. His SFional-Weltanschauung reads like a never ending essay. We
can think nowadays that even Shakespeare was indebted to Montaigne, most
obviously in “The Tempest”. One little detail is that at during the period of
Renaissance humanism, when the orthodox view was that man is the measure of all
things, he asked whether his cat might not be playing with him as much as he
plays with his cat. His radical scepticism paved the way for much of the
scientific and philosophical progress of following centuries. Moreover, his
writings always suggest a thoroughly reasonable and pleasant person. The same
happens with K.J. Parker regarding the way he perceives the way society, and
war in particular, works (or should work I should say). I have just finished
reading "The Two of Swords". It is one of the most honest and
insightful books on war, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to the dreadful
waste and utter stupidity of war. Politicians, officers, you name it, are very
much like the rest of us. They fail because we fail and we fail because success
is not possible. No system, economic, social or political can be designed which
is human-proof. The selfish urges within us will emerge in our actions and
words corrupting whatever beautiful structures we create for national and
international order. The best we can do is seek to transform ourselves and
those around us into kinder, gentler versions of ourselves. This is a struggle
that never ends and begins anew every time a new child is born. Success is only
ever temporary and only ever a mitigation not a total victory. For all that it
is an effort worth making but utopian dreams of a New Jerusalem are more of a
hindrance than a help along the way. But it's one thing to say war is stupid,
another thing is to say it's futile. It’s such a facile, throwaway line. Of
course war is terrible, and futility is certainly a frequent aspect. It’s like
saying that murder is bad, and claiming some moral superiority because you’ve
said it. But irrespective of the claims of pacifists, it takes only one side to
start a war. It’s just that a war with only one side is more commonly called a
genocide. So rather than take a simplistic, clean view, one that protects your
own conscience at the (possible) expense of other people’s lives, why not
instead try to understand that war is deeply complex.

Certainly the political
machinations of the European Powers were not sufficient reason to fight a war.
The First World War was the archetypal war of futility. And the Crusades, and
the Alexandrian Campaigns, and Vietnam, and Iraq, and a host of other wars can
also be properly categorised as futile. But the Second World War was not, nor
the response to the Bosnian Conflict, nor the removal of the Taliban in
Afghanistan. In almost all belligerence, the real causes are hidden behind a
veil of patriotism, religion or politics. These are the methods by which
warmongering leaders get their populations to suspend their usual moral code.
If a war is fought for any of these reasons, it is almost certainly futile. But
if it is fought to protect people from these things, it might be far from
futile. The nation state is not unlike feudal society like the one Parker
depicts, with the only difference being is that we elect our kings and nobles
now. The middle class and the poor for the most part enforce their will all
under the guise of democracy, socialism, communism or theocracy. The ruling
class were prepared to sacrifice some of their own young on the altar of
conquest during the WWI. It’ no wonder then that they showed such utter
contempt for the lives of the working class as they flung them into the
slaughter in their countless thousands. And again in many conflicts since where
the ruling and officer class remained well away from the butchery as the
working class did their bloody work for them.

Parker has written a major essay in the form of fiction, the best
kind there is. And can I even call it SF of the fantasy kind. There’s no better
speculative fiction/science fiction/fantasy writer at the moment. What a
delicious way to wrap things up 2017-wise. No other SF writer could put into words and philosophise at the same time the question “on how
humanity can ever achieve the peace between people”, or “is our
nature itself the well spring of conflict?”. If a large country makes a claim
and can seize some land or other by little effort, e.g., Ancient Rome wrt
Israel, the lot of the many can be said to be improved, while the lot of a few
would be reduced. But doesn't all change adversely affect a few? What drives
the change, real material gain overall, or the satiation of a covetous and
acquisitive nature? Either way it's always the prospect of the future that
capture my SFional imagination. Is the present really so bad? Perhaps we need
to learn to savour what we have in the present rather than what we could have
in the future. Is it our inadequacy, which drives us to gamble all on gaining
something more? And what is our inadequacy other than a mistaken belief that we
are in some way inadequate? Perhaps that is the pivot point, believing that we
are acceptable and loved?

The way the bit of a scrap between Forza and Senza in the middle of the desert is narrated ("show-don't-tell" in play) is worth by itself the price of having these three huge tomes on my bookshelf.

Hi Manuel! Trying to catch up on your review's I'm amazed on your words on this one:). Recently I was amazed on a war trilogy with only 2 books out yet which was from Ken Liu. I'd like that you'd compare this with that world because those were also pages I cherish as one of the best I read (until now).